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Samuel Beckett once
remarked that he switched to writing in French rather than English because he
considered it impossible to express anything in English that was not ambiguous.
Linguistic reform under the auspices of the Académie Française in 17th century
France resulted in a literary language stripped of foreign
borrowings and regional accretions, and about which a century later Rivarol famously claimed that “If
it isn’t clear, it isn’t French”.[1] English, by contrast, has always been
accumulative, happily borrowing from everywhere, unruffled by neologisms,
grammatical innovations and ambivalence.

It thus came as a surprise
to read in William Davies
recent piece that the term neoliberalism has been savagely dismissed as
‘vacuous’ and that so ‘distinguished’ a pressure group as Progress as well as various other
soothsayers have described it as a mindless insult employed by intellectually
lazy people who have no sense of what it might mean.

In rejecting these
complaints, Davies tells us that ‘neoliberalism’ is both complex and ambiguous
because, like other watchwords of political discourse, it is an abstraction
capable of multiple interpretations and shades of meaning, just like
capitalism, communism, democracy, and liberty. What concepts like these have in
common is that they resist one-line interpretation; and the more we try to pin
them down, the more complex and contentious they seem to become. Inability to
elucidate a notion, however, is not the same as lacking a general grasp of its
sense. Called upon to define our daily use of words of more than one syllable,
many of us would probably flunk the test. However, that doesn’t make what we
say unintelligible.

Compared with some other
candidates, ‘neoliberalism’ does not seem to be an especially elusive
abstraction. I take it to mean marketisation of the public realm as a political
project. Its current popularity among political leaders of a certain hue is
that it has the appearance of offering value-free decision-making because it
allows market competition rather than ideological bias to determine value. They
are thereby absolved, at least in theory, from responsibility for the provision
of important public services. In their place, the private sector runs the
services on a competitive basis, or alternatively individuals and
self-organised collectives take charge of their own needs. A recent example of
the latter is the flood defence
initiative in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering.

A core principle of neoliberalism is that citizens are to be defined
first and foremost as consumers. Hence why ‘neoliberal’ governments insist on
‘consumer choice’ in sectors like health and education, a proposition that
derives its force from a now widely discredited but still vital element of
classical economic theory which posits that consumers act rationally in their
own interests. “Rational” is another word capable of multiple interpretations,
but for economists it means optimising the benefit or utility of a transaction;
and it is supposed to be what we do, even though three hundred and fifty years
ago Pascal had already worked out that we don’t – not always at any rate.[2]
Here, therefore, we must wave goodbye to Freud, Jung and the subconscious.

Critical to the idea of ‘consumer choice’ is that, in exercising
their decisions, consumers have clear awareness of the options available.
Misleading advertising doesn’t exist in such an ideal world, patients can
easily work out which hospital is safest for having their appendix removed,
parents can select the best school for their progeny from a range of alternatives
and, if they are sufficiently market savvy, can bag a place there before the
“full up” sign appears on the gate.

Friedrich von
Hayek (1899-1992) is often touted as the titular deity of neoliberal
thought. [3]. He believed that free markets lead to spontaneous order (i.e.
without the need for significant human intervention); and much of his work in
this area can be considered as prolonged libertarian footnotes to Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of
Nations’. Where Hayek would have seriously parted from Adam Smith is
that in Hayek ‘s ideal universe, altruism is an aberration and either non-existent
in fact or, as Ayn Rand would have it,
irrational: “The principal of trade is the only rational ethical principle
for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual
and material.” [4] If we want to do good, Hayek contended, then we should
look to our own interests because: “The morals of the market do lead us to
benefit others, not by our intending to do so, but by making us act in a manner
which, nonetheless, will have just that effect.” [5] This is, of course, a
precise if less elegant rendering of Smith’s celebrated image of the “invisible
hand’, the difference being that Smith didn’t believe commerce to be the sole
pathway to benevolence.[6]

Not entirely careless of
human deprivation, Hayek conceded: “... that some minimum of food, shelter,
and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be
assured to everybody… there is no incompatibility in principle between the
state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual
freedom…” [7]

On the other hand, he
disapproved of welfare, and of the progressive taxation it requires: “…the principle of distributive justice,
once introduced, would not be fulfilled until the whole of society was
organised in accordance with it. This would produce a kind of society which in
all essential respects would be the opposite of a free society.” [8]

His answer to this rather muddy distinction came in a phrase that
the UK
electorate will readily recognise: the Great Society. Unsurprisingly, it
involves, as far as possible, the withdrawal of the state from the provision of
welfare, in the expectation that charities and individual volunteers will take
up the reins. David Cameron’s slightly modified version – the Big Society –
about which we hear less and less, has been savaged by The Independentas
a sham because local charities that are supposed to carry part of the
welfare burden have effectively become sub-contractors to powerful corporations
which have taken over services formerly run by the state. Yet this is exactly
what Hayek had in mind, as the UK’s current prime minister and chancellor are
doubtless aware.

When, under neoliberalism,
an absence of state involvement produces negative results, such as the 2008
banking crisis, or when the private sector fails to meet minimum standards of
service expected by the public, the state intervenes generally by imposing
regulatory frameworks and inspection regimes, but not by restoring state
provision. This exposes a fundamental weakness in the theoretical foundation of
neoliberalism because it rubs up against the demands of democracy. If the
electorate votes for a set of policies aimed at renationalisation, for example,
it cannot then be argued on neoliberal grounds that the public is failing to exercise
‘consumer choice’, and it would be simply perverse to contend that the
government knows better.

Such an obvious contradiction may be one of the reasons why Hayek,
among others, had an equivocal attitude towards democracy. While he was all for
democratically-elected governments, he called for a system in which they would
be free of any obligation to do what the electors had voted for. According to Yale history professor Greg Grandin,
Hayek told an interviewer during a visit to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile: “My
personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a
democratic government devoid of liberalism.”
Milton Friedman, a card-carrying neoliberal
and Hayek fellow-traveller, thought fit to act as an adviser to Pinochet while the
latter was engaged in the torture and murder of political opponents; and
Margaret Thatcher, a Hayek acolyte, apparently saw no problem in befriending Pinochet, nor in cosying up to other dictatorial regimes –
especially if there were lucrative arms sales in the offing. Let us not forget
that, in the stark neoliberal world, commerce is altruistic. Nor should we
complain if neoliberal governments ignore their electoral promises. That is
what Hayek would have them do.

William Davies writes that
neoliberalism is “…about extending (markets or competition) to address
fundamental problems of modernity…” , but except for the word itself, there is
nothing especially modern about either the practice or the political programme
that it implies. Rather it seems more like a reversal to a nineteenth century
idea of social Darwinism whereby competition is supposed to ensure that the
strongest rise to the top for the benefit of society as a whole. Apart,
possibly, from some misguided followers of Herbert Spencer, social Darwinism caught
on solely in the disturbed minds of racial supremacists and disappeared with
the defeat of Nazism. That is until neoliberalism unearthed it in modified form
a little later in the century.

Readers of Dickens will be
all too aware of what life held out for the poor in nineteenth century England
under governments relatively unconcerned with the general welfare. Go back a
little further to the eighteenth century and we can entertain ourselves with
delightful descriptions of the lamentable condition of national infrastructure
and policing, courtesy in this case of historian Christopher Hibbert:

“Coaches became stuck in
the mud or overturned, their axles broke, their horses were lamed, their
occupants thrown out with the luggage
into the ditch... Horace Walpole described the roads in Sussex as ‘bad beyond
all badness'... Even the road between the court suburb of Kensington and
Piccadilly was so ‘infamously bad’ in 1736 that Lord Hervey complained of
living ‘in the same solitude as if cast upon a rock in the middle of the
ocean'.”[9]

Nor was travel safe from
predation by highwaymen. Hibbert writes that in 1774 even Lord North, the prime
minister, was robbed in London’s Gunnersbury Lane; and that foreigners were
astonished at the extent to which highway robbery seemed to be entirely normal.
The Abbé le Blanc, on a visit to the capital, “recorded that in the 1720s
highwaymen... 'fixed up papers at the doors of the rich people about London,
expressly forbidding all persons of what condition or quality soever, to go out
of town without ten guineas and a watch about them, upon pain of death’.”[10]

Government involvement in
social welfare, services and infrastructure thus came about not as the
enactment of an ideology but for purely pragmatic reasons, namely that the
private sector couldn’t or wouldn’t undertake the tasks nor make the necessary
investments.

Long-term investment in public infrastructure is not, of course, an attractive proposition to
the private sector, which is why successive UK governments have struggled to
find investors for major projects. Distant returns are no return at all. It has
taken years for a UK government to be brought kicking and screaming to the
realisation that power stations will not be constructed without government involvement. The UK’s infamous
Private Finance Initiative, initiated by John Major and
enthusiastically adopted by the Blair/Brown government, has worked by dint of
expensive income guarantees to the private sector. What these and many other
examples have highlighted, emphatically so since the 2008 economic crisis, is that
free markets are not free, that when they are poorly regulated they can and do
lead to ruin, and that neoliberalism is sustained paradoxically by government
intervention – though on a discretionary basis. The element of discretion is
important because it tends to operate in favour of vested interests. Quantitative Easing
didn’t go to the public but to banks and insurance companies.

Neoliberalism is not
difficult to understand. It is a simplistic ideology worked out, one suspects,
on the back of a payslip in the cafeteria of an ivory tower by professors who
had little faith in human intelligence except, perhaps, their own. The overt
objective is to make people subservient to the market because it is supposed to
operate more intelligently than humans. Isaiah Berlin would have recognised the
neoliberal project as a tributary of “positive liberty” in which self
realisation depends on the obedience of citizens to paradigmatic rules
established “for their own good”. Free trade deals offer a contemporary
example in that, once they are signed and sealed, they are difficult to undo;
and parties that try to backtrack face the prospect at the very least of
uncomfortable reverses in their terms of trade. The fetters of freedom.

Proponents of
neoliberalism must necessarily ignore the history of economic development not only
in the West but also in countries like present-day China and Korea where
government responsibility for progress has been pivotal. To understand the
potential dangers of neoliberal policies, especially to countries long-since
run on social democratic principles (the UK still qualifies, just), we could do
worse than look back to the extremes of inequality that prevailed in centuries
gone by and to which we now risk returning. And we might recall the
dispiriting features of unregulated capitalism that fired Marx’s outrage, and Dickens’
indignation.

“The world is too much with
us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we
lay waste our powers.”

So wrote Wordsworth.
Before anyone had ever heard of ‘neoliberalism’, the poet knew well enough that
defining us simply as consumers impoverishes us all.

[6] “However selfish
man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which
interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to
him, though they derive nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
I.i.1.1 (1759 - 1770)

[7] Hayek: The Road to
Serfdom, 1944

[8] Hayek: Law,
Legislation and Liberty, the mirage of social justice, Ch.12, 1973